Dungeon and Lair Creation (pro-tips)

Creating dungeons and lairs is one of the most interesting parts of Trove. This guide will give you a basic understanding of things to keep in mind. Qubicle is used as the voxel editor for this guide, all supplied templates are also for Qubicle. Dungeon creation is not limited to this voxel editor, but due to its feature set, it is the easiest option to use.

If you're a modder, you will see lots of similarities with dungeon creation, the big difference can be found in plugs/sockets (work much like Reference Points do in models) and handling the Metaforge.

This guide is meant as an addition to the official guide found at Wikia. Make sure to read that too!

This guide is still a work in progress, but some of the things might be useful for the trials

Getting your dungeon accepted in-game is one of the greatest achievements as a creator in Trove, at least if you can stand people bombing your creations. Dungeon acceptance is a 2-step submission process. First, your dungeon needs to be approved by a moderator on TroveCreations. After which a developer will check it out. Both steps can take a while.

Sockets and plugs connect the individual blueprints to each other. If you are familiar with modding, these are comparable with reference points (AP's). The only difference being, you need both as there is no underlying model connecting them.

The dungeon file is collection file and will support your dungeon in the following ways:

it contains all the blueprint names which will be used to make your dungeon.

[{namebetweenbrackets}] is a unique identifier, these need to be unique in one .dungeon file.

Blueprint references the blueprint it needs to pick for the specified "name". In general, these are unique too, but they don't have to be.

Quantity tells the game how often a certain piece can/will be used.

Weight tells the game the chance a certain piece can be used (randomization \o/).

Make sure the file starts with [Dungeon] and only add "Type = Lair" if you are making a lair.

Now, these are things already found on the Wikia, but there is one small little trick that can make your .dungeon file a little bit more easy to read. In basics the ".dungeon"-file is just a properties-file. If you use an advanced text editor and set the syntax to the "properties"-type, the file will be formatted in a more readable format. This type of file also uses the character "#" for comments. See the image below for an example

Too many on one socket may create variations will create pieces that might rarely or never spawn. This can be used to your advantage if you desire to create a rare version of your dungeon. But in other cases, you do want to increase options on the looks of your dungeon. A good example is the [Shadow Dungeon] The Black Hole made by Keyser95 (link). In this dungeon, he wanted to have all possible biomes as the final room, each with multiple variations.

First (left), he used separate plugs and sockets to relate the final room with different options. These limited him in the possible number of options. To extend the possible options we used a simple 4-way blocker pattern, to create an if-then chain to extend the possible options. In the end he still had enough plugs and sockets left for future biomes.

*Caution: The game will still try to fit all the other pieces, so in theory, this could make your dungeon perform badly if you add too many options. In the example above, the game will still try and fit all 12 pieces.

The available amount of plugs and sockets should suffice in most cases, but the bigger the dungeon, the sooner these can limit your imagination. Metaforge contains two special blocks ( GM Small Blocker and GM Large Blocker) that can:

extend the available plugs and sockets

function as an if-this-then-that construction.

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